Just installed Minion again at work (noticed some addons on my WoWI favorites were updated, so I thought I'd try checking for updates in Minion, since there haven't been any addon updates since I first posted this thread) and came up with some new complaints:
During installation:
(1) Please include an option to
not create a Start Menu folder.
On first run:
(1) "Detecting WoWGame Installs" still takes about 2 full minutes, but at least it doesn't completely hang the app anymore.
(2) I was prompted to back up my addons. This prompt could use a bit of explanatory text, I think. Is it going to create a ZIP file somewhere on my computer? If so, where? Or is it a cloud-based backup like the Curse Client's backup/sync feature? If so, what information is it going to upload? Why does Minion want me to make a backup, anyway? Is it about to wreck my addons folder?
(3) There is a dire need for an additional "okay, I found these WoW installations, which ones do you want to scan for addons?" prompt between the "detecting installs" and "detecting addons" stages. Minion found two ancient copies of WoW on a mapped network drive, and scanning their addons took
forever (16 minutes, to be exact).
(4) During the "detecting addons" stage, Minion appeared to detect a number of addons that I don't have installed (and aren't present in that aforementioned network copies either) such as "
Raio X" (which appears to be an old Portuguese version of Examiner, which I do have installed) and "Grid Pack" (an extremely outdated bundle including Grid and some Grid plugins; I do have Grid installed, obviously, but I don't have any the plugins from the bundle installed). Unfortunately, by the time this long long process finished, I forgot about this, and removed the network installs before checking their addon lists to see if Minion actually listed these mistmatches in the installed addons list.
(5) The "Add Game" function doesn't seem to work. After selecting World of Warcraft and navigating to the game install path and clicking Select, the dialog closes, and nothing happens. Selecting the top-level program folder, the Interface folder, or the Interface/AddOns folder all yielded the same result.
Also, the treeview for selecting a WoW folder is pretty buggy. About half the time when selecting a drive, the tree panel is just blank; I have to select a different drive and then re-select the desired drive to get a list. And when I do get a folder list, the order in which the folders are listed seems totally random. It's certainly not alphabetical, and doesn't appear to be chronological either, at least according to the created and modified dates on the folders I checked.
(6) SVN working copies and Git repositories are still shown as needing updating. This makes the "Update All" feature completely useless for addon authors.
(7) Addons needing updates should be at the top of the list. Scrolling through ~150 addons in a window that only shows 5 at a time (and only scrolls by 3 at a time) is
extremely painful.
(8) Tooltips on version numbers don't appear immediately. I just thought they didn't work, until I accidentally left the cursor over a version number, and noticed that a tooltip appeared after 1-2 full seconds.
(9) Clicking on an addon immediately pops up an overlay with info about the addon. This is pretty annoying, as clicking on a window is a very common method of bringing the clicked app back into focus.
(10) Scrolling in the addons list is more consistent now. However, responsiveness in general is very bad across the whole app. Scrolling still has a noticable delay between the time I turn the mousewheel and the time the UI actually scrolls. Clicking on most things (game in the left column, installed/get more/options tabs across the top, sort dropdown) has a noticable lag time (0.5-1 seconds). Typing in the search box is extremely slow (when seaching on the "get more" list, there's about a 1-second freeze after every letter typed in the box).
Specific misidentifications:
AckisRecipeList_QuickScan was marked as needing an update from 5.4.0-1.0.8 to 5.4.0-1.0.8 (same version).
ArchyFix (a private unreleased addon) was misidentified as
Archy 1.6.3 Fix, an ancient fan update from 2011 (which should really have been moved to the Outdated category by now). Some kind of basic size comparison on ambiguous name matches could easily tell that an addon that's 308 Kb zipped cannot possibly be the correct match for a 3 KB (uncompressed) addon. Alternatively, you could copy the Curse Client's approach -- prompt the user, tell them what you guessed, and ask them to confirm it before you show the addon in the list as ready to update.
Bazooka was marked as needing an update from v2.4.0 to v2.3.1 (older version).
OmniCC was marked as needing an update from 5.4.3 to 5.4.1 (older version).
Postal was marked as needing an update from 3.5.1 to v3.5.0 (older version, extra letter).
On second run:
Startup time seems to have gotten worse since I last tried it. Having an SSD at home vs HDD at work is probably a large contributing factor here, though, so I'll run it again later at home to get a better comparison.
Though I did not update everything that was marked as needing an update on the first run, no addons are now shown as needing updates. I guess having seen the update in the app before is marking it as "done" but that's obviously not correct behavior -- if I didn't actually update the addon, then it's still in need of an update.